Social Media

5 Essential Tips for Managing Your Users' Social Profile Data

Vidya Shivkumar is director of products at Janrain and has built and shipped consumer, B2B and B2C products and services for over a decade.

Online behavior tracking has been successfully employed for nearly a decade, but its tools do not uniquely identify users, and rightfully so. Tracking was only designed to group users into audience segments; for example, golden retriever owners who live in San Francisco, CA, or baseball and wine enthusiast females in their 30s who live in Seattle, WA.

Of course, certain laws restrict combining offline data sources with online user behavior tracking. Therefore, how do brands get to know users individually, rather than as one of many in an audience segment?

Require a social network login to access your website. You request permission to access visitors’ social profiles and, when approved, you’ll have an opportunity to build a wealth of knowledge on the individual user. Learn about their hobbies and interests, friends, likes, age, marital status, places visited and alma mater. And the best part is that your users have consciously opted to share this information with you.

Obtaining the user’s social profile data is the first step. The following tips detail how to access rich social profile information, while avoiding some of the challenges associated with data gathering.

Social profile data is complex and dynamic. Depending on the particular social network, the data can range from professional affiliations, education history, friends lists, current location and checkins.

Social profile data is useful only if actionable. A copious amount of user data is worthless if you are unable to feed it to existing systems such as email marketing tools or content personalization engines.

Social profile data is relevant only when combined with other data sources. Social does not have to replace what you already know about your users. The real win is augmenting existing intelligence with this new, valuable social data source.

Let’s also look at five critical considerations for collecting, storing and managing social profile data.

1. Structure and Discipline

Consider hosting data in a flexible and extensible schema. This will ensure that data has rules and constraints placed around it. For example, verify that an email address is unique and accurate, that date of birth follows a consistent format, that zip code and phone number, if mandatory, are present, etc.

2. Multi-Channel Support

According to Nielsen, smartphones make up over 40% of all mobile phones in the U.S., and smartphone owners are three times more likely to access the Internet via their handsets. Brands are catching onto this trend by offering both web and mobile experiences for their users.

3. Availability, Redundancy and Backup

Like any other user databases, social profile storage systems need to be available 24/7. They should be supported by enterprise-class service-level agreements (SLAs), be backed up so that data is not lost in the event of catastrophic disk failures, and most importantly, be redundant to minimize service interruptions.

4. “Don’t Make the User Think”

Those of us who have conceived of, built and launched a registration system know that screens and workflow are crucial components to data collection. After all, a well-designed interface can make or break your data collection plans. But they take time to build and get right. (My company has estimated that a default workflow for capturing, editing and displaying social data takes up to 19 screens!)

Today, no profile system is complete without a public and a private profile page. Users have come to expect a page in which they can manage their settings for the data they share with your brand. Also, if your site offers community features such as blogs, reviews or comments, users want to be able to manage their public persona via a public profile page. Last but not least, users expect branded interfaces so they know who is managing their data.

5. Third-Party Access

Now let’s look at things to consider when making social data usable and actionable. Most brand marketers want to use social data, at a minimum, to power their targeted email marketing programs. Others want to use the data for onsite personalization, such as serving relevant news articles, displaying merchandise, or even promoting concert tickets relevant a user’s interests.

When you combine social data with legacy or traditional user data, you build a 360-degree perspective about your users. However, not all third-party tools need to know everything in your database to operate effectively. For instance, an email marketing tool may only need access to first and last names, email addresses, interests and zip codes for a segment of mountain climbers in Portland, OR. Thanks to protocols such as OAuth, building such capabilities into a registration system is now possible.

Given that marketers need to be able to customize and change their marketing segments often, this type of segment creation must be easy to set up via a dashboard, and should not require a database administrator, a web programmer and an operations team to roll out.

Visitors to your site are showing up with a wealth of information that you can leverage to improve the onsite experience. The critical element for marketers is to have the right tools in place to request, store and manage users’ social profile data for meaningful purposes. The more ubiquitous these tools become, the more users will demand engagement and personalization on your site.

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